You know, Graduation Day is almost upon us. And either through the residual sheer joy of my no longer being in High School or excessive ignorance of the educational world around me, this great day for thousands of teenagers all over this land has completely snuck up on me from the scholastic shadows.
I remember that about a million years ago the days dredged on and on, the clock would creep its way to 3 o'clock. Ticks, tock, pause several long and arduous moments then tick, tock again. Day after day. Semester after semester. You didn't live by the Gregorian Calendar. Rather your biorhythms were dominated by The 3 R's and Nazi-like principals and instructors from the coach who made you run laps to the slimy mad scientist yelling at you to KILL THE FROG!
But since Graduation Day all that has changed. You not only gained entry into the larger world around you but you were allowed to live among them as real human beings. Frolicking through the week without worry of tests or laps or frogs. And then, like a dream it all fades away. You forget when High School traditionally begins or ends. One day you see all these damn kids walking around in fancy dresses and tuxedos and you remember "Oh yeah, Prom happens right about this time of year."
It's like there is two different time dimensions on this planet: School and Not-school. And nary the twain shall they meet. But imagine how hard it is for those unfortunate few who are perpetually stuck in the School Time frame. You know the flunkies.
I used to be a flunky. No, I never had to repeat a grade but I did see a few courses more than once. I remember saying once, if you ever discovered my body dead in a gutter somewhere you could rest assured know that a coma splice was what killed me. Algebra also. Deadly little suckers formulas are, I tell you. And as I'm sure that at least some of you may remember it sucks also. Now, think about having to repeat that grade and then having the whole world know about it.
Compound that to you and your entire school getting the do-over command. How about the county? Hell, let's go for broke. How about the whole damn city!
Los Angeles, California announced a few weeks ago that they may have to flunk out 237,000 students from the public school system and hold them back a grade due to poor grades. 237,000?!? Now I know the educational system is very bad in this country and it's only getting worse. A vicious cycle combined with a downward spiral has taken control of academia and is not letting go.
Now we know the cliché about schools passing on poor students who can't read or write all the way through the schooling process and then sending them to man the cash registers at McDonald's. The sad part is, Los Angeles has certified the cliché. They announced recently that they are lowering the original figure of over a quarter of a million to 13,500. Talk about a bell curve! But this is the absolute wrong thing to do.
Education is a wordy subject and I don't want to monopolize time here but I will say that I think it's a bad idea to simply pass these kids on. In fact it seems the school system stopped trying to educate kids a long time ago. It's like an assembly line. Think about it.
You start off at the beginning of the line with a blank mind and body. You activate the conveyor belt in Pre-school and the child slowly rolls along. Little things are added, education is added but the child continues to roll along. Eventually the speed of the belt increases and the school system becomes like Lucy and Ethel shoving chocolate covered balls of trigonometry and biology and such down the child's throat.
Suddenly the child is spit out and gets to walk on it's own. "Educated". Is that what we want or need? No. I have a very simple solution for all this. It may not be prefect but the current system isn't exactly Aristotle's Rhetoric, you know. Do you remember when you were going to school and you thought that learning all these things was NEVER going to help you in the real world? You remember taking biology and thinking, "I don't want to be a doctor. What do I cares what makes up the inner compliments of an Earthworm?"
You just wanted to get to the sex education part of the course and then go make out in the parking lot. THAT is useful information! Consider this then. Things like biology and trigonometry and French and all that crap should only be electives that are allowed to be taken after proof of basic skills are given. In other words you need to show you have a mastery of English before you can learn another language. Prove you can add, subtract, multiply and divide before you take geometry.
Schools have rigid structures of educational platforms. In your sophomore year you learn this. In your junior year you learn that. Why? Because that's what everyone else is learning. That is cookie cutter technology, my friends. And my thought? If you still can't diagram a sentence or divide a six-digit number into another six-digit number in your head then you don't need to work on the Pythagorean theorems of this world or be writing a weekly article on the Internet called The Hy5. Wait. Uh, nevermind.
I wish that happened with me. I'm a cookie cutter student also. I never got passed along but I certainly followed the fold. Any successes I have had I attribute only to the few teachers who were not just along the assembly line. They were the ones who reached out and made sure I possessed two very rare things these days: understanding and comprehension. Contrary to definition: These two things are NOT the same.
Okay, enough soapbox. But I strongly suggest to those who have kids or nephews and nieces or friends in school to help them out. And let's work on stopping thinking the phenomenon of being held back as a bad thing. I prefer we hold back kids until they "get it". Passing them along like Los Angeles is doing right now is wrong. They mitigated their flunk reduction decision by saying they wanted to lessen the shock to the system.
Well you know what shocks to the system do? They shake it up. They liven it up, make it aware of the problems it is having. Clearly L.A. doesn't want to solve the problems. They want to keep the line moving. And thus the cycle continues.
Two different time dimensions indeed. And guess who's stuck in the past?
Just something to think about. Have a good weekend.
-Hy